In the midst of my break from employment, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find that there’s been no desire to monetize any of my hobbies. No bookstagram, no fountain pen trading, no videogame streams. For a long time, I fixated on productivity, so it’s freeing to realize that I can finally just enjoy things for what they are, and not aspire to make more of it.
This year was so much. From getting COVID in January to the campaign and it’s aftermath, here are the three books that have stayed with me and kept me sane.
Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn
I read this book in the midst of my COVID-19 isolation, and what a balm it was! I hadn’t read any epistolary fiction before this, and it felt strangely appropriate to be doing so while I was so disconnected from the world.
Ella Minnow Pea, the titular character, lives on a fictional island off the coast of South Carolina. The island is named after Nevin Nollop, author of the pangram, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." (A pangram is a sentence or phrase that includes all the letters of the English alphabet.) As the book progresses, the characters find that they have less and less letters from the alphabet to use; the inciting incident is one of the letters from the statue falls off, and the village elders take it as a sign to cast away the use of that letter entirely.
This book is so clever and I found it to be such a triumph of language and syntax without being overbearing or pretentious. At 200+ pages, it’s a pretty quick read too, and the ending is so well deserved.
While I hope that your underground meetings prove independently fruitful, I cannot count on them – forgive my blunt honesty here – and must parcel my optimism in such a way as to best contribute to the state of my emotional health.
Were there all twenty-six letters available for my use, my ability to translate my feelings, my thoughts of Nate to this page might still be put to supreme test. “F” leaves us tonight. I haven’t even the strength to curse those beasts with that epithet you taught me never to say. It’s pointless at this point, anyway.
The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley
When the 2022 campaign started in earnest, I told my book club that it was unlikely that I’d be able to read for fun until after the elections. Still, we agreed to proceed as normal, and R chose this book. This was the book I had when I was deployed to Iloilo, and for the days that I was there, I stayed up for an extra hour just to read. I vaguely remember tearing up in the airport, before my flight back to Manila, because of this book.
The Kingdoms is a fascinating story about Joe Tournier, set in the nineteenth-century French colony of England. I hesitate to say more; I thought that this was an alternate universe kind of book, but there’s time travel (sort of), too. This book is described as cross-genre fiction, but the shortest summary is that Joe is a man who has lost himself, and through the novel he finds much more than that.
I also deeply loved Natasha Pulley’s prose, and it was hard to choose a favorite line.
Nothing helped, but smoking was something to do.
“Listen to yourself. You’re hoping the bomb is just a ball, and that you won’t have to defuse it. But hoping for the best is not a strategy.”
Kite nodded slowly, still neutral. It was, Joe saw now, the breakable neutrality people aimed at the very ancient or the nascently lunatic.
Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
Anyone who has seen me since the elections knows that I will not shut up about this book. Y recommended it, and since I’m not too keen on non-fiction, I was expecting something mildly interesting. David Graeber had me hooked in less than five pages.
My elevator pitch - Debt is a sociological, anthropological retrospective of human society and the way debt shapes our morality, our relationships, and our view of the world. Graeber is a sharp, sassy writer who makes a cutting analysis of economics, coinage/currency, and politics. Best of all, he doesn’t make you feel stupid about not knowing any of this.
Two months after finishing this book I still find myself thinking about it. Life-changing sounds too monumental, but I do think that this book has given me a new lens to view the world.
“Surely one has to pay one’s debts.” The reason it’s so powerful is that it’s not actually an economic statement: it’s a moral statement.
What, precisely, does it mean to say that our sense of morality and justice is reduced to the language of a business deal? What does it mean when we reduce moral obligations to debts? What changes when the one turns into the other? And how do we speak about them when our language has been so shaped by the market?
This is the first in a series where I write about my unproductive (the unkind word is useless) hobbies! I figured that I should try and stay true to my initial rationale for starting this newsletter (blog? tinyletter?? this thing) which was to catalogue what stirs emotion. Coming soon - fountain pens, videogames, and another sort of new hobby I picked up during my break from work.
The Night, The Porch — Mark Strand
To stare at nothing is to learn by heart
What all of us will be swept into, and baring oneself
To the wind is feeling the ungraspable somewhere close by.
Trees can sway or be still. Day or night can be what they wish.
What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfort
Of being strangers, at least to ourselves. This is the crux
Of the matter, which is why even now we seem to be waiting
For something whose appearance would be its vanishing—
The sound, say, of a few leaves falling, or just one leaf,
Or less. There is no end to what we can learn. The book out there
Tells us much, and was never written with us in mind.